


A Reason To Look Away

by LemmingDancer



Category: Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms, Sherlock Holmes (Downey films)
Genre: Dubious Consent, Friends to Lovers, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Misunderstandings, PTSD John, Past Rape/Non-con, Rape Recovery, Sickfic, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-27
Updated: 2019-05-27
Packaged: 2020-03-09 01:56:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 11,603
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18907162
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LemmingDancer/pseuds/LemmingDancer
Summary: Not long after Watson and Holmes first met, when their trust in each other was still fragile, the detective coerced the doctor into a salacious subterfuge. Watson’s violently negative reaction drew a hard line between the two men that has lasted fifteen years. When dangerous circumstances force them across that line at last, can their partnership survive?





	1. A salacious subterfuge

**Author's Note:**

> Rated M for language, mature themes, and (Richie-verse) canon typical violence. 
> 
> Trigger warning: this fic includes mentions of a past rape and its repercussions, which are NOT graphically described, but very much at the heart of the story. If that is triggering for you, practice self-care and turn around now. Also, if you are struggling to cope with circumstances like these, please consider talking to someone. The National Sexual Assault Hotline is free and confidential. You can visit online.rainn.org or call the National Sexual Assault Hotline at 800.656.HOPE (4673). I promise, it really does help.

They had not lived together long when it became clear that the good doctor John H. Watson was unnaturally tolerant of detective Sherlock Holmes’s eccentricities. When Holmes suddenly became flush with rent money only a few months after they began to cohabitate, and became proportionately more unbearable as a result, Watson surprised himself by finding most of his colleague’s deplorable habits somewhat reassuring evidence of the detective’s humanity. There were, of course, things Watson would not tolerate (anything that endangered the safety of innocent bystanders; more than, at last count, three contiguous nights of violin solos), and he expected there were indignities Holmes would not subject him to under any circumstances. He hoped so, anyway, though he had yet to gather much evidence to support his fledgling faith.

This case had begun like any other, a distressed client, much hand wringing, and it had ended like most of the cases Watson had experienced so far: with them running for their lives. At least a dozen well-armed men were chasing them through the dirty warren of London’s streets. Watson’s revolver was out of bullets (Holmes’s revolver was on the mantle in the sitting room), his leg was cramping painfully, and his vision had gone hazy around the edges from lack of oxygen. He would soon find himself unable to keep up with Holmes, exactly the sort of weakness he’d hoped to downplay to the detective for as long as possible.

Watson’s stomach twisted in shame. He tried to ignore the bile rising in his throat as he panted for breath.

Holmes, for his part, was gleefully oblivious to Watson's growing humiliation. Or rather, he was aware of everything and far more concerned with other data. No doubt he knew what each of their pursuers had eaten for dinner and how the cross-eyed brute took his tea. The detective had clearly discerned that Watson was weakening, if the suddenly reasonable speed of their once breakneck escape was any indication; no doubt he had calculated the timing of Watson’s imminent collapse down to the second.

“You knew…” Watson puffed as he nearly bumped into the detective's shoulder.

“That they had a small army prepared for an ambush? Of course, as you would have, if you’d expended even a trifling amount of energy in observation.”

“How…What did you hope to…? Why?!”

“Pick a question, Watson. Or better yet, save your breath.”

The shouts of the men behind them grew louder and Holmes began to trot again. Watson made a strangled noise of frustration but limped along behind his fellow-lodger.

“Everything is under control, my good man!” Holmes glowed in the dim gas light, lit up from within by the joy of a puzzle solved, a plan coming to fruition. Watson never had any idea what the plan was, but he was still drawn along in the man’s wake, the proverbial moth to flame.

“This way, lads!” rang out clear behind them.

Watson looked over his shoulder at the as yet empty street and nearly crashed to the ground as Holmes yanked him by the lapels into a shadowy alley.

“Holmes. This is a dead end.”

“Brilliantly deduced.” Holmes stripped off his jacket, fumbling with the buttons of his coat.

“What…?”

“We can’t outrun them, my good man.” In the shadows, his eyes were coal black and bottomless, like the darkness beyond the lamplight, the space between the stars. “We need a disguise. Strip!”

“I fail to see how less clothing is more of a disguise,” Watson said, but his shaking fingers already fumbled to obey. He trusted Holmes.

Footsteps echoed in the distance and Holmes scowled at Watson. The detective had already stripped to shirtsleeves, a long triangle of ivory skin visible through his partially open shirt.

“You’re taking too long!” Holmes swatted Watson’s hands away from his waistcoat and slammed the doctor back against the alley wall, hard enough to knock what little breath he had from his chest.

“What are you doing?” Watson gasped on an inhale. He shoved with limbs gone clumsy at Holmes’s quick fingers on his chest, the detective tearing open his clothing with enough force to make buttons pop.

“I’m giving them a reason to look away.” Holmes grinned up into Watson’s face, the same mad joy they’d both shared as they snuck into the warehouse to liberate the Duchess’ jewels from under the villains’ noses. What little enthusiasm Watson had left for the night, however, was draining from him like blood from a slashed carotid artery.

“No,” he said too loudly.

“Don’t worry, old chap, a few moments of close quarters, close enough to offend these ruffians’ delicate sensibilities, and they’ll be gone.”

“No,” Watson said again, and he wasn’t sure who he was talking to, Holmes or the ghosts who now shared the detective’s face.

“Steady on, Watson. They seem an easily offended sort. We’ll be home within the hour.”

Then Holmes pulled Watson away from the wall by the collar of his half-open shirt and spun him to face it. Watson tried desperately to keep his balance, but he wavered on unsteady legs, dragged down by exhaustion, mired in fear, and burdened with a sudden bloom of memory splashing across his mind like a spray of blood on snow.

Holmes bore down on Watson, pressing him face first into the wall, plastering his own body over the doctor’s.

Watson saw red.

* * *

_Really_ , Holmes thought as they fled the warehouse, _this Watson is turning out to be a most convenient companion._

They pounded through the streets, flying like the hounds of hell were on their heels.

_Handy in a fight, with the medical knowledge to be even more so after a fight, and just intelligent enough to keep up or shut up during a case._ Holmes could not have found a better companion if he had designed one himself. If part of the fun was in having a like-minded companion at all, well, Holmes had no frame of reference for evaluating that. 

Watson’s breath behind him was coming in pained gasps. _The limp is a bit tiresome, but so are landladies and police inspectors._ Holmes wasn’t in the business of being overly bothered by what he could not change.

Holmes slowed; they only needed enough time to change their appearance. He kept up the light banter with Watson as he surveyed their environs for a likely place to abscond themselves. This back and forth between them was another point in the doctor’s favor. He passed the conversational baton with the ease of a natural player in Holmes’s favorite sport, discourse.

_Most attractive,_ Holmes could not help thinking as they both shed their more recognizable outer garments.  The doctor was undeniably handsome, neat and muscular, sharp-eyed and soft-lipped, but Holmes knew his own proclivities. He knew that appearance and even gender were only minor components in what attracted him to a person, as generally not even the most handsome face could tempt him. But on some rare occasions, once or twice in his life, his own traitorous human nature forced him to engage in those lesser forms of expression. Always, there was some spark of the exceptional, something to hold his interest. What that was in Watson, he did not yet know. But he was interested.

Boots clattered on the cobbles half a block away, a newborn cried from an upper story room behind them, the humidity fogging the windows indicated it would rain within the hour, Watson’s eyes were blue as an August sky and he was making some complaint about Holmes’s brilliant plan.

“Steady on, Watson. They seem an easily offended sort. We’ll be home within the hour.” Holmes spun Watson around and pressed him into the wall.

Watson very nearly broke Holmes’s nose.

There were enemies at the mouth of the alley now, and Watson had turned into a feral thing in his arms. The doctor slammed down on Holmes’s instep, kicked backwards at his groin, and writhed beneath him, snarling with incoherent rage.

“Be still! Don’t fight, John!”

If anything, this entreaty only enraged the doctor further.

A voice hailed them from the street. “You there! What are you on about? Someone hand me the lamp.”

Holmes felt a pang of loss. His new fellow-lodger, possible friend, would not forgive him for this.

Grabbing Watson by the wrist, Holmes wrenched the arm that still carried a jezail bullet up and behind the doctor’s back. Watson went rigid beneath him with a gasp just as the villain with the lamp entered the alley.

“Hold still, whore,” Holmes snarled for the benefit of their audience. Watson somehow became even more immobile against him.

Never loosening his grip on Watson’s injured arm, Holmes used his free hand to pull Watson’s trousers down as far as they would go while still in bracers, hopefully far enough to be believable. He began to thrust his hips against Watson’s backside. They were both largely clothed, with many layers between them, but the friction and heat, the feel of Watson warm and alive and _there_ against Holmes, had him hard in moments.

“What…?” The man behind them was catching on, slowly.

“Bit busy here,” Holmes shouted, not looking up from where he’d buried his face against the silken steel of Watson’s neck. The doctor’s face was twisted towards him, and Holmes could feel Watson’s lips moving soundlessly in his hair in time with each of Holmes’s thrusts.

“Filthy inverts, I should beat the perversion out of your skins.” The voice rapidly retreated.

The men began to disperse, directionless and with no urgency. Holmes waited, keeping up the lewd movements, the stream of obscenity-laden filth and dirty grunts, until the last of the footsteps faded away.

Stepping back from Watson was like leaping from height in the dark.

Watson broke his nose with the first blow. Holmes blocked the second but the force of it knocked him to the ground. He did not fight back as Watson straddled his chest and began to blindly pummel his face. The detective deduced, or rather felt instinctively, that if he fought back it would end with them both beaten beyond recognition. Instead, Holmes let the doctor blunt his anger on his shielding forearms.

“What…How could…” Watson panted when he had punched himself out.

Holmes lowered his arms. “I saved our lives.”

The doctor, still sitting on Holmes’s chest, looked worse than the detective had ever seen him, and he had not thought the man would live out the month when they first met. Watson’s chest heaved, taking in great gulps of air without seeming to relieve his breathlessness. His eyes were a bloodshot mess to match his face, which had been scraped raw from ear to ear by the bricks.

“You should not have fought,” Holmes told him. “You only made it worse.”

He did not see the punch that knocked him out.


	2. Repercussions

Watson felt the last shreds of his sanity slip through his fingers. He rolled off the unconscious detective and staggered to his feet. In the distance, men shouted to each other, still searching for him and Homes.

The doctor paced; fists smashed against the sides of his head as if he could physically hold himself together. The copper tang of blood choked him, hands scrabbled at his clothes, his shoulder screamed in agony, a hard body pinned him down. He was drowning in a flood of actual and phantom sensations, his sense of reality distorted beyond recovery.

A window slammed shut, dragging him at least in part back to the dirty alley, their present dire circumstances. Holmes had, in fact, saved their lives. An internal voice that sounded too much like the detective pointed out that there had been no ready hiding place, no quick escape possible. He was the one turning this, this _disguise,_ into a crisis. He was the flawed man, the cripple. He was broken.

_Holmes must not know._

The detective stirred. Watson knelt and checked his pulse, finding it strong. After a moment of internal struggle, Watson took Holmes in his arms and heaved him over his shoulder. Standing was an act of will more trying than anything that had happened yet on this black night, but he made it to his feet with only one choked off cry.

“Two blocks and we’ll be in safer territory,” Watson told himself and his burden. He focused on the cobbles and saw patterned carpet, concentrated on Holmes's weight on his shoulder and felt another pressing against him from behind. 

_"You like it, whore."_  

Watson's head jerked up, searching for the speaker and knowing he would not find him. This voice spoke from his past.

_Holmes must not know. I can’t allow him to know. What little respect he has for me will be entirely lost._

The detective began to come around.

“Wahhtsohhnnn,” he slurred from where he hung over the doctor’s shoulder, “Nehxst week, next week…we enter you at the punchbowl.”

The flare of affectionate amusement almost hurt; Watson could not give in to it. Anger, the righteous anger of gentleman, was his only shield, whether he deserved to carry it or not.

“You enjoyed that,” Watson accused, his voice cracking on the last word.

“I most certainly did not,” Holmes responded with far more dignity than should be possible for a man slung over a shoulder like a sack of potatoes.

“You did, I felt your…”

“Cock? Surely you can say the word, Watson.”

Watson dropped Holmes to the ground, none to gently.

“Come now, Doctor." Holmes looked up at him, calmly composed despite the disorganized sprawl of his arms and legs. "You must know that the manifestation of a man’s desire is not entirely within his control. It’s a natural reaction of the body.”

“There is nothing natural about that act, between men.” He leaned on the wall, as much to avoid looking at Holmes as for the support.

A beat of silence. “In my experience, there is nothing farther beyond reason, nothing more in the realm of natural, instinctive reaction, than, than…that.”

“Listen to me, Holmes,” Watson rasped, using the blind fear still flashing through him to give his voice an edge, “You may be an addict and a sin against natural order-” _as am I_ “-but I will not be forced to-, I-, I will not be complicit in that lowest form of immorality. I will not be party to your disgusting depravity.”

“I understand you perfectly.” Holmes’s face was blank as mud. 

“Do you.”

“You are small-minded and condemnatory of anything you cannot understand. You blindly uphold the so-called morality your father taught you, even though you loathe the man for his all-to-predictable alcoholism.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about.” Watson took an involuntary step back at the mention of his father.

“Oh you are no mystery, Watson. Your mind is a common thing, as unexceptional as horse dung and no more interesting. The only thing more disappointing than these crude opinions formed by your second-rate intellect is the intolerable physical disability that nearly got us killed tonight.” As if to prove how much more able he was, Holmes wobbled to his feet and began to wander away under his own power.

Watson swallowed hard, tasting blood. He ignored the stream of insults Holmes dropped as he followed the detective home. Most didn’t make any sense, garbled by Holmes’s probable concussion. And the rest, well. Holmes wasn’t telling him anything he didn’t already know. Better this fragile friendship budding between them was severed now, with Holmes thinking him a useless, judgmental conformist, than the detective deduce Watson’s hidden shame.

* * *

Of course, their partnership did not end there, though Holmes avoided Watson for weeks. A companion so committed to blindly propping up the antiquated structures of puritanical society, a man who would break his companion’s nose for saving his life in a slightly-less-than-conventional way, well, such a companion was not so convenient after all. Indeed, he could hardly see how they would continue to share rooms now that the gentleman doctor knew about Holmes’s depravity.

Then, by a coincidence only possible in London, which was enormous and crowded and still somehow only contained a dozen or so active players at any one time, they ran into each other in a bustling street, in front of a bank that was being robbed. And for all that Watson loathed a fundamental part of who Holmes was, when that bank robber pointed his pistol at Holmes, the doctor stepped in front of him and took the bullet.

Holmes scrabbled around in Watson’s coats in a cruel echo of their last night together and discovered the bullet lodged firmly in a book in the doctor’s breast pocket, instead of his heart.

“The bible?” Holmes asked, with none of his intended dripping sarcasm.

“ _An Abbreviated Guide to the Soils of Her Majesty’s Kingdom_ ,” Watson replied, meeting Holmes’s eyes as he pushed himself up on his elbows.

“This is my book!” Holmes exclaimed.

“You left it in the mortuary, Sunday last. I meant to return it to you.”

Holmes passed his fingers over the deformed bullet sticking out of the cover. “Indeed.”

“I’m, erm. Sorry. About the bullet hole.”

“Yes, well. We both have a few. You more than me, so.”

It was as close as either would come to a full apology, and perhaps more than either felt they deserved. Holmes stood and offered his hand to Watson, trying not to act surprised when the other man took it without hesitation.

They fell back into their natural rhythm with each other, and eventually settled into a closeness neither had ever experienced before, an intimacy born from complimentary souls living and nearly dying together by turns. They did not speak of the incident again; Holmes planned to never _think_ of it again. But even Holmes couldn’t plan for every eventuality.


	3. Across the line

Holmes felt as if he’d been here before, this dead-end alley in this slum, these dozen crooks chasing them through the night.

He and Watson were different of course, a decade and a half older and at least a few years wiser. Watson had met and married Ms. Mary Morstan. Holmes had died; Mary had died. Holmes had come back from the dead and Mary hadn’t. They took a case, they took a risk, and now they might very well die themselves if Holmes didn’t think of something. But he could not think beyond the wrongness of this situation.

Watson looked at him. Even in the dim light, Holmes could see the jerking bob of his Adam’s apple as he swallowed hard.

“We’ll have to give them a reason to look away,” Watson intoned like a man saying his last words. His shaking fingers already pulled at his jacket, peeling away the outer layers of his clothes.

Holmes hesitated with his hands on his own lapels. Watson, who danced with gypsies as easily as he tipped his hat to proper English ladies, who checked the pulse of downed murders with as much care as he treated a veteran’s nerves, his Watson, who tolerated every indignity, could not tolerate this aspect of Holmes and it hurt more than a meat hook to the shoulder. 

“Holmes,” Watson grated out. His voice was hoarse with suppressed emotion, and Holmes knew he had already lost. Either Watson would die in a hail of fists and bullets, or Holmes would drive him away with his own uncontrollable, shameful depravity. In the latter scenario, Watson lived. It wasn’t really a choice.

Holmes stripped off his jacket, coat and waistcoat.

The doctor had given up with fumbling at his waistcoat, instead yanking hard at the back of his trousers, tearing them free from his bracers. He turned to face the wall, one hand came up to fist beside his face, partially obscuring his features, the other…

Watson twisted his injured arm up and back, behind him, offering it Holmes.

Something broke loose inside Holmes, shredding his insides with its jagged edges. _Watson’s experience of sex between men involves having his arm twisted behind him._

Footsteps clattered in the mouth of the alley. Holmes took the hand Watson was offering him and laced their fingers together, then pulled the arm into a more natural position at their sides. He pressed his body into Watson’s back, his mind cataloging details he hadn’t allowed himself to see since they were the barest of acquaintances, a spiraling series of deductions that squeezed the air from his lungs in a long, terrified whoosh.

“What are you lot doing?”

“Isn’t it obvious?” Holmes shouted in response, flavoring his speech with a heavy accent.

He was moving his hips now, thrusting against Watson, because he had to, the lamp light was coming closer, and his damned body was responding. He kept up a ragged chant in Watson’s ear, a stream of French this time instead of filth.

“ _My dearest one, please tell me I have not been so wrong for so many years_ ,” he begged his friend. Watson was beyond hearing him, even if he could have understood the French. His eyes were wide and glassy, and he made no effort to keep the side of his face from sliding against the bricks. It was a familiar look, the far away daze his face took on when he remembered Maiwand, when he woke shouting about blood and pain.

Holmes saw too clearly now, now that it was not just a flat-mate and sometime colleague slammed up against a dirty alley wall, but his Watson still as death beneath him. His Watson, who was quick tempered and sarcastic, but never truly angry unless he was scared. His Watson, whose lips were forming the word “no” with each of Holmes’s thrusts.

The detective’s hips shuddered to a stop. If it was a choice between death and forcing Watson to relive _being violated_ , Holmes choose death.

As usual, he had underestimated Watson. Their fingers were still twined together, and the doctor dragged Holmes closer by hugging himself with their entangled arms, forcing Holmes to embrace him in the same motion. Watson thrust his hips back, the stuttering motion tearing from him a strangled, animal cry that spoke more of pain and humiliation than pleasure.

The man approaching from behind made a gagging sound, spat at the back of Holmes’s head, and beat a hasty retreat.

Holmes wrenched away from Watson, scrambling back before their pursuers’ steps had even faded. Watson slid down the wall like corpse, flopped over onto his hands and knees in the gutter, and vomited.

The detective dropped beside his friend. His hands fluttered uselessly by the doctor’s shoulders, afraid to touch and afraid not to touch.

“Am I so repellant,” Watson said, and it should have been a sarcastic question. It should have been _a question_.

“Don’t be ridiculous, dear man,” Holmes bit back. He still did not touch. “Can you move?”

“Of course I can.” Watson put action to words by using the wall to claw his way back to vertical. Holmes felt his own fingertips shred; his own nails bend back on the bricks. They staggered together down the alley and into the street, Holmes a step behind Watson, one hand a few inches beneath his elbow as if tethered by an invisible chain.

They quick-marched without speaking for an eternity that lasted no more than ten minutes. It began to rain, a steady, soaking drizzle.

Watson, ever the stronger of the two of them, spoke first. “You are hovering.”

“Have I hurt-How angry are-Have I made, everything, worse with my-myself?” _Dear God, save us from my attempts at caregiving._

Watson tripped over nothing. “I have no idea what you are asking. But that charade was my idea, was it not? This time, anyway.”

This should have reassured Holmes. But Watson was still marching along with a set jaw and distant eyes, and the detective, deduced - _no- felt_ , that the comfortable, beautiful thing between them had gotten twisted around, and he didn’t know how to set it right. Watson was bleeding somewhere inside, a wound Holmes had opened, and he did not know how to staunch the flow.

“Who?” Holmes asked with murder in his voice.

“No,” Watson responded.

Holmes opened his mouth to argue and then shut it with a click. He would never be able to hear that word from Watson’s mouth the same way again. From the bitter twist of the doctor’s lips, he knew it.

Watson stopped walking so suddenly Homes had to dance to the side to avoid colliding with his back.

“I fought,” Watson said in a voice scraped raw. He met the detective’s eyes for the first time since the alley. Rain streamed down his cheeks, mingling with blood from his scrapes and dripping pink from his chin. His face was nothing but earnest as he delivered revelations like blows. “I fought them.”

 _Them._ Holmes wondered if this was love; this crippling pain twisting his stomach and stealing his breath. He forced himself not to look away.

“I do not doubt it,” Holmes said. “Some fights cannot be won, sometimes the odds…”

Watson’s mouth twitched; he understood odds. He grunted in agreement and they began to walk again. They did not speak until they were standing at the bottom of the stairs outside 221B. Holmes, for the first time in his long, noisy life, did not know what to say.

“You are staring,” Watson said.

“You are the most fascinating thing here to be seen.” Holmes cursed his quick tongue.

“I am not a puzzle to be solved.” Watson’s tone could have stripped paint.

“Of course, of course. You are perfectly…perfect as you are.”

“Do not condescend to me!”

Holmes blew out an exasperated breath. “You would prefer some verbal sparring? To be cut by a scathing comment?”

“Yes!”

“You are being quite ridiculous, acting the child,” Holmes said, even as he thought, _this cannot be the right way to handle this situation._

“Well, I think it’s my turn to play the child.”

“…Touché.”

“Just shut up.” Watson’s voice was choked as he struggled to speak. “I need you to know. I need you to know that I did not enjoy it.”

Bile rose in the back of Holmes’s throat. “If you are concerned that I will force my affections on you, under the mistaken impression that any of what passed here tonight was pleasurable to either party…” But given how Holmes had behaved, how he had _lusted_ , tonight, fifteen years ago and far too often in between, Watson’s fear did not seem entirely unfounded.

“That is not what I meant, idiot.” Watson climbed the stairs to the front door, leaving Holmes trying to deduce what the doctor did mean from the set of his shoulders, the rigidity of his posture.

“We should clean and disinfect your face,” Holmes said as he trailed after his friend.

Watson gave a weary sigh, but he went straight up the stairs and to the sitting room without further prodding. He collapsed into the settee in front of the fire with a soggy squelch. Holmes retrieved the doctor’s bag, lit the lamps, poked the fire into blazing, and then settled on an ottoman before Watson to pick at the grit embedded in his face.

An uncomfortable silence descended on the room. Though Watson’s face was only inches from his own, Holmes felt as if he was stretching across a great distance to touch, or rather carefully not touch, his friend. He was _not_ rendering very effective wound care.

Had Watson’s eyelashes always been so long? When the doctor blinked, Holmes could swear they brushed his cheeks. And those lips…

_How can I be thinking like this, now of all times?_

Holmes’s hands began to shake.

“Go and pour yourself a brandy, Holmes. Bring your shaving mirror with you when you come back.”

“Bossy, mother hen.” Holmes jumped to obey, immeasurably glad to have an achievable task to accomplish.

A few moments and several shots later, Holmes held the mirror for Watson as he removed the dirt from his wounds with rock steady hands.

“You seem fine,” Holmes said, hating the surprise in his voice.

“I am not fine. But as I have been varying degrees of ‘not fine’ for my entire adult life, at least it is a familiar condition.”

Holmes laughed then, a strangled fragile thing, wrung out of him despite the fear and stress. Watson grinned at him over the mirror, and the detective gave in to the impulse, throwing his head back and howling.

“Well, my good doctor,” Holmes finally gasped out, wiping his streaming eyes, “As I am far from fine myself, I am relieved to find myself in good company. As always.”


	4. A cracked lens

Life at 221B went on again the next day in much the same way it had gone the day before. Holmes threw himself, and Watson, into his work. Every case that crossed his desk, they took. No criminal, no matter how pedestrian, went uncaught. No light-fingered maid went unpunished and no blackguard went unpursued. In the meantime, Mrs. Hudson brought tea and scones, Gladstone waddled about in the sitting room, the rain fell and new politicians rose. Nothing had changed but the lens through which Watson viewed the world. He felt as if he watched it all from a great distance, through cracked and blackened glass.

There was one real, painfully obvious difference. Holmes never touched him anymore. He never favored the doctor with a casual pat on the shoulder as he passed, they did not bump into each other congenially in the crowded streets, the detective no longer fell asleep on his shoulder at a moment’s notice. Holmes didn’t even catch his elbow when Watson stumbled coming out of a cab, leaving him to crash into Clarkie on the street.

Watson had not realized before how much he wanted to be touched, how much he needed physical contact. He missed having someone to lean on when the cold made his leg ache, missed how Holmes would act as if his support was a friendly courtesy and not the necessity it sometimes was. He craved the passing touches, the daily, sometimes hourly affirmation: _this is me and this is you and we are together_. It was like an amputated limb, taken for granted until it was gone and unbearably painful in its absence.

And worst of all, Watson wanted more. He had spent a lifetime carefully maintaining the clear line between the good and the bad, the transcendental and the morally corrupt in his own soul, but those barriers had shattered. The tilt of Holmes's chin when he played the violin made Watson want to kiss the soft skin behind the detective's ear. Nightmares in which Holmes took a part in his humiliation alternated with waking fantasies of the detective holding him tenderly, whispering his name in a voice heavy with want. 

It didn't matter what Watson wanted, though. Holmes did not touch him; his fingers didn't so much as graze the doctor's when they exchanged teacups. When Watson could be objective, when he had managed a few hours of dreamless sleep and choked down more than a few mouthfuls of tea, when they were riding the high of a case well-solved, he could theorize that Holmes was trying to spare him any unwelcome invasion of his person. Most of the time, however, he just felt too disgusting to be touched. Holmes must know how truly tainted and undeserving Watson really was. He must know that Watson had lied to him, that night at the bottom of the stairs. Holmes always knew when he lied.

Watson did not try to bridge the new space between them.

His practice picked up. A minor outbreak of influenza gripped the city, and he worked mechanically for weeks, nursing patients and shuffling bitter medicines from house to house.

He did not realize he was ill himself for days, too many days.

* * *

Holmes had not seen Watson for a while. Three days, 8 hours and 46 minutes, actually. The detective was not hovering; he was not staring. He was being deliberately, obstinately normal in how he treated his friend. Or at least, he thought he was. They had been thrown so far from their normal, Holmes wasn’t entirely sure what it had been all this time.

“Nanny!” Holmes shouted down the stairs. Instead of Mrs. Hudson, a timid maid he did not recognize appeared.

“She’s gone to nurse her sister, sir.”

“This tea tray needs to be cleared, and where is Doctor Watson’s breakfast?”

“He hasn’t come down for it since I been here, so I stopped making ‘im one.”

Holmes abandoned the worthless conversation with the maid.

Watson’s jacket and hat were hanging in the hallway, his medical bag sat just inside his office. Glancing up the stairs, Holmes saw the doctor’s bedroom door was closed.

He was in front of his friend’s room without deciding to climb the stairs.

“Watson?”

No response from within.

Holmes knocked on the door, though he had never before, in their years of cohabitation, bothered with that courtesy. _What must he think of me?_

“Watson, I’m coming in.” Holmes had expected the door to be locked, but it swung open when he tried the handle.

For a moment that shortened Holmes’s lifetime, he thought Watson was dead.

He cataloged the scene in an instant. The floor around the bed was littered with the accoutrements of illness, half empty water glasses and teacups, medicine vials tipped and rolled about, a basin. Watson lay on his back in the bed, partially tangled in the sheets. His torso was bare, his ribs clearly visible beneath auburn chest hair, a thinness too pronounced to be the product of a few days.

Watson’s chest moved as he breathed, and Holmes began to breathe again as well. He realized he was shouting as he moved across the room, an incoherent mix of calls for help and pleas for Watson to wake up.

“What…?” The maid must have followed him upstairs.

“Fetch Doctor Jones, immediately.” Holmes ordered.

He was at Watson’s bedside now. He pressed his ear to Watson’s chest, needing to experience his heartbeat with as many senses as possible. It was strong and steady beneath Holmes’s ear, beating hard under heated skin. He grasped the man by both shoulders and began to shake him gently.

“Watson, Watson, Watson.”

Watson woke slowly. “Holmes…what…are you well?” He looked the detective up and down with bleary eyes, searching for an injury.

Holmes’s heart constricted painfully in his chest. He had to focus on something other than his friend’s worried face, that worry only for Holmes even as his own body burned. Holmes focused on his battered and stained hands, which gripped the doctor so hard he was half raised off the bed. Holmes did not have Watson’s permission to claw at him in this way.

Jerking back as if scalded, Holmes dropped Watson. The doctor exhaled in a sharp huff, as if he’d been punched in the gut. He met the detective’s wild stare with eyes like broken glass.

Moving as if each muscle had to be independently coerced into action, Watson rolled away from Holmes to face the wall.

“Go away, Holmes.” The knobs of his spine moved beneath his skin as he settled.

Holmes did not leave, and Watson did not order him away again. As the minutes ticked into an hour, his shallow breathing evened out in an uneasy sleep.

Doctor Jones, a man Watson had occasionally employed to stitch wounds he could not reach on himself, arrived to find Holmes frozen, rooted in the center of the room, unable to look away from the slight movement of Watson’s side as he breathed.

“Influenza?” Jones asked, his voice pitched low for a sickroom.

“Obviously,” Holmes snapped back, his own loudness startling him.

Watson did not stir.

“Let’s see what we have,” Jones said. He grasped Watson by the shoulder and tried to turn him onto his back. Watson struggled weakly against his hold, striking out at the other man with uncoordinated limbs and twisting closer to the wall. Partially dried tear tracks glistened on his cheeks.

“Hold him down,” Jones commanded Holmes.

“I will do nothing of the sort.” Holmes could not look away from the tears still caught in Watson’s lashes.

“Do you want to help him? If his fever is high enough for delirium….”

 _Watson could die_. Holmes sat at the head of the bed. He scooped up his friend in one motion, pulling Watson’s bare back against his chest, trapping his arms at his sides by hugging him around the waist.

“Please, _mon frère_ ,” Holmes begged.

Watson went boneless in his arms with a sigh, his head tipped back to rest on the detective’s shoulder before Holmes had even decided what he was begging for.

“Hmph,” Jones said. He checked Watson’s pulse and listened to his lungs. “How long has he been ill?”

“I don’t know. Two or three days.”

Jones brushed his hands over Watson’s ribs, fingertips dragging in the shallow dishes between them. Watson twitched away from the touch, impossibly closer to Holmes.

“Then either his health was poor at the start, or this fever is burning through his reserves dangerously quickly.”

Holmes shrugged helplessly. “He knew me when I woke him, not an hour ago.”

“He knows you now.”

Holmes blinked at Jones, but the doctor had gone to the door to shout for the maid. “Draw a cold water bath,” He ordered her.

“Watson hates being cold,” Holmes observed tonelessly.

“He will hate being reduced to idiocy more, if we let the fever cook his brain. Well, he may beyond caring at that point, but…”

Holmes’s mind provided him with the image of Watson, drool dribbling down his chin, eyes blank and staring. Watson, without his firecracker quick comebacks, without his medical knowledge, without his sharp curiosity. The detective considered vomiting and discarded the impulse as a waste of time.

“I’ll do it,” Holmes said as Jones moved to help him pull Watson from bed. “Come on, dear friend, get those feet beneath you. I need your help.”

Watson sucked in a deeper breath. He didn’t seem to be fully awake, but he was aware enough to straighten against Holmes’s shoulder. Somehow, they stayed vertical as the detective dragged him off the bed and staggered to the bathroom.

Holmes got Watson into the tub, leaving his smalls on. He tried hard not to think about how vulnerable the doctor must feel, barely clothed, sliding weakly down the back of the tub. Holmes crouched behind the tub and wrapped one arm around Watson’s chest to keep his chin above the water.

The sick man began to shiver.

“I’m so sorry, John.” Holmes said.

Watson’s eyes opened. His head lolled against the tub as he searched for Holmes.

“What…” he stopped to clear his throat painfully. “What are you sorry for?”

“You’re ill, and…”

Watson rolled his eyes, then winced as if even that movement was painful. “I had noticed.”

“And, I have to-”

“Keep me from drowning. Yes, that would be appreciated.”

Holmes snorted. “Right.”

“Just…don’t let me go, Holmes.” Watson’s eyes slid shut. He was shivering so hard Holmes could hear his teeth rattle. “Don’t let me go.”


	5. Sickness

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the delay! This is a tough chapter. It is so much easier to break someone than it is to put them back together.

The next week was the longest of Holmes’s life. Cold water baths, a wracking cough and Watson’s increasing incoherence all blurred together into a waking nightmare.

Doctor Jones visited daily, monitoring his progress and administering medications. 

“He needs to sleep, deeply, restfully,” Jones said. He and Holmes watched as Watson twitched feebly in his sleep, making a pained little gasp.

“He can’t,” Holmes said. He ran his fingers through his own hair and yanked, using the pain to sharpen his focus. “Give him something.”

“He has had enough. I fear the cure may kill him before the illness gets the chance.”

Watson cried out again, louder, and Holmes couldn’t help but smooth a sweaty curl off his friend’s brow.

“You must prepare yourself for the worst,” Jones said. His eyes shone with grief. Holmes hated him for it; he had no right to it.

“I will not,” Holmes said.

“If there are affairs to be arranged, you should start. If…if there is any unfinished business between you…”

Holmes jerked his hand back from Watson’s face. He glared at Jones. “You have no right. And there is no point; he has not recognized my presence for days.”

Jones quirked an eyebrow at that. He was looking at Watson, now lying as still as death. “He knows you.”

Holmes did not hear him leave. He stared down at Watson, who was no longer neat nor muscular, not sharp-eyed and not soft-lipped, and somehow even more beloved.

Watson began to twitch again, rhythmically, like he was running in his sleep, or…he whimpered.

 _“Don’t let me go,”_ Watson had begged.

“I could never let you go,” Holmes finally admitted. He went to the door and locked it. Before he could doubt himself, he crawled onto Watson’s bed, laying on top of the covers between the doctor and the wall.

Here he hesitated. He had done so much damage to Watson already, did he dare risk doing more? Could he risk doing nothing?

_Don’t let me go._

It seemed a straightforward directive.

Holmes slid one arm beneath Watson’s waist, wincing as his knuckles scraped across the doctor’s too-prominent spine. He wrapped the other arm around Watson’s torso and winched himself close to his best friend’s side. He relaxed his head onto Watson’s bare shoulder with the sigh of a man coming home. Watson’s heartbeat rattled in Holmes’s ear, the filigree of scar tissue pressed to his cheek mutely attesting to how close the doctor had already come to death

“You have followed me into near-death and worse, my dear one. But in this, I fear, our roles are reversed. I can not let you go, and if you insist on leaving, I will follow.” It may be tomorrow, to a criminal’s bullet, or a year from now to the needle, but Holmes knew that without Watson to set his back against, he would fall.

Lulled by Watson’s heartbeat, Holmes slept.

* * *

Watson woke coherent, feeling drained and weak, but also, for the first time in recent memory, safe. He opened his eyes to investigate this novel situation.

Holmes was clinging to his side like a barnacle. Watson waited for the feel of phantom hands, waited for his own screams to start echoing in his ears...and then waited some more. He could feel Holmes's rough cheek on his skin, could hear the detective's soft snore, but the wave of agonizing sensations did not wash over him. He was not fool enough to think himself forever beyond the grip of those terrors, but for now at least, his memories remained in the past. He was anchored to this time, to this bed in this room and this man.

It felt natural and right, in a way that would have surprised Watson if he wasn't already used to Holmes upending his worldview. Basking in the warmth of his friend's body wrapped around his, Watson's shameful moral degradation of the past weeks now felt more like the painful release from a pattern of self-punishment that stretched back to his childhood.

With shaking fingers, Watson brushed Holmes's unruly hair back from the his face. He let his arm come up to loosely loop around the detective's waist.

It felt right, this slotting together of their physical selves when they had already woven the rest of lives into the same cloth. Perhaps it was time for Watson to re-draw his moral lines again, with the detective and himself together in every meaningful way, finally, on the right side of his personal morality.

If Holmes would have him.  _He knows I lied to him. He knows my shame._

Watson took a deep, steadying breath through cracked lips and a raw throat. The sharp odors of tobacco and formaldehyde assaulted him, sending him into a coughing fit that wracked his body for minutes.

Strong arms tightened around his torso.

“Holmes…you smell awful.”

The body molded to his turned to stone. “Watson. I am…”

“Keeping me from drowning. It is appreciated.”

“…Yes, well. It is a chore. You should smell yourself.”

“Ugh, I can.”

A flurry of activity followed. Watson was too tired to attempt a full bath, but Holmes helped him to the bathroom for a scrub and a change of clothes, then badgered him into drinking tea and broth when the effort of moving around made both seem far too difficult. Eventually, he was allowed to collapse on his bed, which now sported clean sheets.

If he had been tired before, he was beyond exhausted now. He felt fragile as an eggshell.

“Watson, I’m…” Holmes stuttered to a stop. He was adrift in the middle of Watson’s room.

“You’re leaving an alarming number of sentences unfinished, old cock.”

“I…” Holmes began to take slow steps backwards to the door. The sight closed Watson’s windpipe like hands around his throat.

Holmes didn’t approach as Watson rolled to his side to cough into his pillow. He tried to tell himself that the tears springing up in his eyes were due to the razors scraping the back of his throat, and not the ten feet of cold space between them.

“Watson?”

Watson didn’t have the words for what he wanted, what he knew he did not deserve. He didn’t have the energy to hold himself together anymore. Unfolding his fingers towards Holmes, he hoped the detective could overcome his reservations and give Watson this small comfort.

Holmes was on his knees at Watson’s bedside in an instant, giving him his hand. The doctor sandwiched it between both of his, and then wrapped himself around the detective’s entire arm like a child clinging to a favorite toy.

“Dear man, what is wrong? Besides the obvious debilitating illness, pain, and emaciation.”

Watson snorted into the back of Holmes’s hand. “I’m being unforgivably selfish.”

“I’ll allow it, just this once. You haven’t answered my question.”

“I understand why you don’t want…” he could force nothing more past the lump in his throat.

“My dearest one, I want. I want with a constancy and intensity that scares me; I was certain it would scare _you.”_

Watson forced himself to unfold a little. “You must know I lied to you, the other night, the night when everything went wrong. You must know my shame.”

Holmes shook his head. There was no disgust in his teak eyes, so close to Watson’s.

The doctor could not bear to look at him. He pressed his forehead to the back of Holmes’s hand, his mouth working silently.

As always, the detective heard the words Watson did not say. As always, Holmes argued with him. “You did _not_ enjoy it. What they did to you, _you did not enjoy it_.”

Watson let out a strangled chuckle. “You are wrong. I know I shouldn’t have; the whole idea was to rid me of the impulse altogether…”

“Whose idea?”

“What?”

“Whose idea was it, to hurt you, in an attempt to change your nature?”

“Please Holmes, just leave it.”

“…So you felt some physical pleasure in the act.” Holmes sounded as if he might be sick and Watson could not blame him. He forced himself to loosen his grip on the detective so he could withdraw, but Holmes squeezed his fingers harder. “I stand by what I said, all those years ago. Bodies, stimuli, it’s all lamentably messy. You know this, as a medical man.”

He did. But it was one thing to know and another to believe.

“Watson, pleasure given against a person’s will is a perversion of the worst form. It is pain by a different name.”

Watson folded Holmes’s pronouncement into himself, stored it as a difficult truth to be considered later. For now, it was enough that the detective believed it.

“If my presence isn’t causing you distress, can I come back to bed?” Holmes asked.

“I wish you would.”

“Good, my knees are killing me.”

“There’s a joke in there somewhere.”

“Please, spare us.”

Holmes climbed over Watson to the side of the bed closest to the wall, and then proceeded to drape the doctor over himself like a cape. He wiggled backwards, until they were pressed together from top to toes, Holmes’s back to Watson’s chest.

Watson took a breath and forced himself to relax. His eyes were gummy and his body felt heavy, but blessed unconsciousness continued to hover just out of reach.

“You are thinking very loudly back there, Doctor.”

Watson huffed, Holmes’s hair tickling his nose.

“Out with it, Watson. I, for one, would like some sleep.” 

“I let them rape me.” He said it, not hiding behind euphemism; the hated word was unnaturally loud in the quiet room.

“Impossible, by very definition."

Watson huffed. "Then I did not resist strongly enough."

Holmes fidgeted a bit in his arms then quieted. "You fought the only way you could.”

“You cannot know that.”

Apparently unable to contain himself any longer, Holmes twisted around in his arms until they were facing. Warily, Watson leaned back a bit so he could see the detective's face without going cross-eyed. His expression was fierce.

“I know you, Watson. I know how you fight. You may not always fight to win, but you always fight to survive. And you survived. You lived. You have lived _well_. So as far as I am concerned, you won the only fight that mattered.”

Holmes plunked a single chaste kiss in the center of Watson's forehead, studied the doctor's stunned face for a moment and then gave a decisive nod. He rolled back over and dragged Watson around himself again.

Watson smiled, little more than a twitch of his mustache, but a smile. “If you say so, detective.”

“I do. As you know, I am always right.”

“Except when you aren’t.”

“Don’t be a dingy bird. And go to sleep.”


	6. Truth

Understanding Watson had always been easy for Holmes, before. The doctor seldom bothered to hide his feelings, even at the beginning of their acquaintance when he might still have believed it possible. Of course, the detective now knew he'd underestimated Watson's ability to influence Holmes's deductions by manipulating his emotions. This discovery probably should have worried Holmes, and truly, it would terrify him to know that anyone other than Watson had this power over him. But Holmes trusted Watson. It was himself he could no longer trust with so delicate a matter as interpreting Watson.

Take this moment as an example. It was less than a week after his fever broke and Watson was sitting in his customary chair beside the fire, with Holmes likewise in his usual place among a mess of papers on the rug before it. The doctor apparently wanted him to think he was reading the journal in his lap, for occasionally he remembered to turn a page in it, but he was mostly just staring at the side of Holmes's face. Unable to bear the scrutiny any longer, Holmes met Watson's eyes.

He could not read what he saw there. What was in those blue depths? Anger? Fear? Or (dare he hope) desire? Even Watson's expressive face was no help. If forced to label it, Holmes would have called it rapt, as if the doctor waited on Holmes to make some unknown move.

Holmes sighed and turned back to moving papers around aimlessly on the floor. It shouldn’t have been so difficult to know what to say, when to reach out and when to hold back. After all, Holmes had taught Watson to dance once before. They should have been able learn how to move together again.

"That is the fourth time you've sighed in as many minutes," Watson said, startling Holmes out of his circling thoughts.

Holmes jumped to his feet to pace and promptly slipped on a newspaper. Watson caught his elbow before he could crash headfirst into the fire.

"Do you need anything? Another cup of tea?" Holmes asked.

"I do need something, actually." Watson gave his elbow a squeeze, then stood and went to the desk.

"Really?" Holmes brightened. "Excellent."

“Find a case,” the doctor said, shoving correspondence into Holmes’s arms. “You are not built for nursing any more than I am built for the forced idleness of recuperation. But as I do not have any choice in the matter, you will find a worthwhile occupation for yourself.”

Watson smiled, taking the sting out of his words, and steered Holmes with a hand on the small of the detective's back. Distracted by the myriad potential implications of the touch, Holmes didn't realize he was in the hallway until Watson shut the sitting room door in with a soft click.

Holmes went to his room and dumped the untidy stack of paper on his bed. He began to pace his room. Only one case held his interest. There was just the small matter of having been explicitly told not to pursue it by the one person who had a right to make such a decree. 

At breakfast yesterday, Watson had offered him a piece of toast, buttered and with just the perfect amount of jam, far more than the doctor liked. But instead of putting it on the detective's empty plate, as Watson usually did when he was not-so-subtly mothering Holmes into eating, he had held it up for Holmes to take a bite. It _could_ be a signal of deepening romantic interest. Or an new level of dedication to the detective's health...Or...Or...Or...Holmes had just stared at the toast, struggling to deduce the meaning behind the gesture, until Watson shrugged and ate it himself. 

It didn’t matter that John had asked him to leave it alone, and Holmes hated himself for that.  He couldn’t move forward, didn’t know how to act, without more data.

* * *

 

For three days Holmes dug into Watson’s past. If his investigation into Moriarty had been frenzied, this inquiry was obsessive. Unfortunately for Holmes, he already knew most of what he discovered. Watson came from a middle class family in Glasgow. His mother died not long after he was born, leaving him to be raised by his alcoholic, businessman father and his alcoholic, layabout brother. His brother was 6 years his senior. Medical school, the war, the injuries, a string of lovers (all women) across three continents…Holmes had known the majority at a glance when they first met.

_“I have been varying degrees of ‘not fine’ for my entire adult life_ ,” Watson had said. The answer, then, lay in his childhood. That deduction sent Holmes to the punchbowl for several vicious rounds, and then to the one person in the city who had more investigative resources at his disposal than Sherlock.

* * *

“Sherly! This is a surprise. I see that Mrs. Hudson ran out of strong flour this morning.”

“Mykie. Stanley likewise did not order enough eggs for your household.”

“Quite correct, quite correct. And the doorman…” Mycroft paused in his partially complete dinner. “My dear brother, what is wrong?”

“You can’t deduce from how I have tied my cravat?”

“Is Doctor Watson well?”

Holmes sank down in a chair with a huff. The Stranger’s Room at the Diogenes was quiet, as usual. It did little to ease his mind today. “You can’t know a thing about the doctor’s state based on my appearance.”

“As his left sleeve may as well be stitched to your right, his very absence speaks volumes.”

“He is well. Recovering from a brief illness.” Holmes had to stop and swallow. His lip, split last night during a particularly difficult bout, began to bleed. “He is as well as can be expected.”

“Indeed.” Mycroft began to eat again, but his eyes didn’t leave Holmes’s face. “What can I do for you, Sherly?”

“A man cannot meet his brother for dinner?”

“A man can, but as you and I do not, I deduce you need something.”

“I need information.”

“Naturally.”

“About Watson.” The taste of blood was sharp in Holmes’s mouth.

Mycroft snorted into his napkin. “Surely if there is something of interest left to be discovered about the good and truly uninteresting doctor, you can find it.”

“His life as I know it began in London. I need to speak to people who knew him before that, before medical school and the army.” _And I need to do it without leaving him here in London alone._

“If Doctor Watson has managed to keep some part of himself secret from you for this long, he must have invested a considerable amount of energy in the effort.”

“There is something I must know.”

"Indeed." Mycroft chewed, complacent as a cow with his cud. He let the silence stretch.

Holmes ground his teeth. "Watson was. As a boy." This was not a coherent statement by any stretch, but he knew a thousand minute tells gave away how deeply this mater affected him. His nostrils flared, his fists clenched on the arms of his chair, he rolled his shoulders as if preparing to box. 

Mycroft hummed. 

“Just names, Mycroft. Do not stick that crooked beak of yours into this any farther than necessary.”

“Sherly,” Mycroft shifted his bulk. In a lesser man, it would have read as discomfort. “I have been told that it can be better not to know.”

“I don’t believe that and neither do you.”

“Of course not. But I feel obligated, as your brother, to point out the prevailing wisdom.”

A card arrived from Mycroft two days later, with a single line written on the back in his brother’s flowing script.

_William Smith, Barrister. Take care, brother mine._


	7. Move Together

William Smith lived above his office on Oxford Circus, not two streets from Watson’s one-time home with Mary. Smith had three children, a beautiful wife and a thriving legal counsel. If his wife did not see to his mending and breakfasted in a different room, well. No doubt everyone who knew them would say she was an excessively busy woman.

Holmes improvised a legal crisis involving a last will and testament and procured a same-day consultation with Smith. He was a beautiful man, the detective forced himself to admit. Despite his wife’s subtle sabotage, he dressed impeccably, in a navy blue pinstripe suit that brought out his deep blue eyes. He had combed his light colored-hair and oiled it, his part straight as a razor, emphasizing his strong, square face. When he rose to shake Holmes’s hand, the detective had to look up; the barrister had easily four inches on him. His hand was powdery soft, so different from Holmes’s calloused, scarred fist.

“What can I help you with, Mr…?” Smith asked.

“Holmes. Sherlock Holmes.”

Smith rocked back on his heels. “The famous detective?”

Holmes bared his teeth in a mirthless smile. It would have been safer to use a false name, to manufacture a disguise, but this was something he had to do as himself.

They both sat, Smith behind an immaculately clean and largely barren desk, Holmes in the comfortable chair in front of it.

The silence stretched. Smith broke it nervously. “You are not here to discuss a will.”

“You are smarter than you look.”

“John.”

Holmes bared his teeth at Smith’s use of the doctor’s Christian name. “Yes.”

“I have read the stories he wrote about you. If you were even half as clever as John describes you, I knew you’d come eventually.”

“And here I am.”

“I had hoped that perhaps your affection for John would stay your hand.”

“It is my affection for _John_ that forces my hand.”

“You would see him imprisoned? For a dalliance between teenage boys?”

Holmes blinked. “I would see the animal who hurt him dead, though I don’t intend for it to be nearly so quick as a hanging.”

Smith blinked. “Then you are too late.”

“I think you’d best explain. Be concise.”

Smith narrowed his eyes. “What has John told you?”

“Never you mind.” Holmes pulled his revolver out of his pocket and set it on the desk between them. “Worry about what you tell me now.”

Smith swallowed hard but still hesitated. Holmes picked up the gun. “My friend has been hurt and I am angry. I would really like to shoot someone. Thank you for the opportunity.”

Smith raised his hands in surrender.

“We went to the same boarding school as boys,” he began, “For a time anyway. We had known each for most of our lives. He was an exceptionally kind boy; with the sweetest nature I have ever encountered.” The affection was clear in his voice.

Holmes ground his teeth. “Vulnerability should not invite violence.”

The barrister cleared his throat. He seemed…sad. “I could not agree more. We weren’t much past fourteen and so innocent when…I swear to you; it was just schoolyard fumbling. It never had a chance to progress beyond two teenagers rolling around in the grass.”

“I don’t believe you.” All the evidence supported Smith, from his reactions to his neat, sad, falsified life, but Holmes ignored it.

“John’s brother caught us. I managed to make an escape before he got a proper look at me, but John. John paid the price.”

Holmes lowered his revolver. He knew the rest of the story, had known it from the instant Smith had spoken John’s name with such grieved affection.

Smith scrubbed his face with his hands. “I talked to John one more time, a few days later. I climbed up to his bedroom to see him. I didn’t fully understand what had happened then and on some level, I still cannot believe that such evil can exist so casually within a family.”

“No,” Holmes denied the coming truth.

Now that he had started, Smith seemed unable to stop. “John was laying on his stomach. He held my hand and told me that I musn’t allow myself to be an invert, a whore. That people would hurt me. He hadn’t told them who I was, even when they beat him, when they…when they hurt him.” His voice was choked with emotion.

 _“Who?”_ Holmes would skin them alive. He would feed them their own quivering viscera.

“I don't know the exact...details. His brother and a few thuggish friends convinced John’s father that it would cure him of ‘his proclivities’. After, they took him out of our school and sent him halfway across the country to finish the term. I didn’t dare write, but I kept track of him as best I could, and…them as well, his brother and those disgusting friends of his. They are all dead from drink and hard-luck and their own stupidity.”

Holmes deflated into his seat.  

“It made me hopeful,” Smith said, “To read of your adventures together. I thought perhaps John had found something like peace. I can’t help but wonder how much of the boy I knew remains in the man.”

Holmes pictured a young Watson, open faced and bright eyed, who had never killed or been shot, who hadn’t yet grown a thick skin of scars and sarcasm. “I never knew that boy. And I fear the man who remains will not find much peace with me, nor much room for sweetness.”

“Hmm.” Smith said. “I think you are wrong.”

“You know nothing about me; about the man John has become.”

“I know you are here, threatening me with a gun on his behalf. Perhaps not sweet, conventionally, but certainly an act of a deeply loyal companion.”

* * *

Holmes hated when Mycroft was right. Which he always was. But in this Holmes had hoped his brother was wrong; he had prayed to a higher power he did believe in that solving the mystery would grant him the insight he needed to find the path forward. He had counted on it. But knowing who had hurt Watson did nothing to ease the soul-deep pain Holmes felt on his friend’s behalf. It only provided his mind with a thousand new and gut-wrenching images of a boy violated by the very people who should have protected him.

Watson was asleep when Holmes got back to their rooms, two days and half a dozen bare-knuckle fights later. From the stack of papers and books beside the settee, the doctor had installed himself in the sitting room some time before. A medical journal was open in his lap; his injured leg half-hanging off the seat awkwardly. Holmes’s stomach swooped at the sight of him lying there, just being Watson.

The detective crossed to his friend and touched his knee. Watson twitched awake, hand closing hard on Holmes’s wrist.

“Just me, old chap.” Holmes said.

“Sorry.” Watson let go of his wrist and gave his hand an apologetic pat. He pushed himself a little closer to upright. Holmes lifted the doctor’s injured leg on to the settee, then after a moment’s consideration, lifted both legs and slid beneath them, so he was seated with Watson’s knees across his lap.

Watson lay back with a sigh. “This slow recovery is killing me more surely than the damn illness.”

“I want it noted how good a friend I am being, by not pointing out the irony of you saying such a thing, to me.”

“You just did.”

Holmes gave him an absent smile then frowned at the fire.

“I observe your case did not go well.” Watson poked the bruised knuckles of the hand resting on his knee.

“I have solved it.”

“And yet you have broken your hand on someone’s face.”

“I found no satisfaction in the resolution.”

Watson’s fingertips on his cheek surprised Holmes into looking at the doctor, who held up fingers that glistened in the firelight.

“You are crying, Holmes.”

“I do not cry.”

“Right. And why are you not crying?”

It was hard to pick just one reason. “I have betrayed you, my friend.”

“I think that might be overstating it somewhat.” He said it with a familiar weary resignation. “Is your curiosity at least satisfied?”

“My curiosity, if nothing else.” Holmes studied Watson. His face, still too thin, was twisted in some expression caught between humiliation and affectionate amusement. It was, sadly, also familiar, as he wore this expression all too often around Holmes.

“And what new deductions have you made?” Watson asked.

“That the world is a darker and more terrible place than I knew. That I have once again underestimated the incredible, unflinching strength that is the bedrock of your soul.”

Watson waved away the compliment with an impatient hand.“You never could leave well enough alone,” he said. 

“It hardly felt ‘well enough’ to me.”

“It was once. And it will be again. We will be too.” He smiled his shy smile, the one he hid beneath his mustache and a ducked head. Holmes usually had to surprise it out of him; and perhaps Smith was right after all, for this was a sweetness in Watson that Holmes had long cherished. 

Holmes picked at the fabric covering Watson’s knees. “I just wanted…”

“You mentioned that before. I have yet to see any evidence.”

Watson could not be asking for what Holmes thought he was asking for; he could not want what Holmes had wanted for all these years. And yet the doctor’s pupils were dilated, his breathing quickened, his pulse visibly throbbing in his throat.

“I wanted to do something to help,” Holmes said. _To help you recover from this hurt and any other the world has ever inflicted on you._

“Excellent. Do something then.” Watson fisted a hand in Holmes’s sleeve and gave it a commanding tug, pulling the detective’s face down towards his own. “Start with the kissing, that’s the usual order of things.”

Their lips met like key slotting into lock. Watson seemed to unfurl beneath him, his body relaxing and his mouth opening to Holmes. He tasted of brandy and medication; his mustache tickled Holmes’s nose. The detective pulled back, then tried to soothe the hurt of rejection off Watson’s face with a thumb over his too-sharp cheekbone.

“I don’t want to do something wrong.” Holmes said with his heart in his throat. He was bracing himself now over Watson, fighting back a wave of dizzy, fearful, arousal.

“You are the great Sherlock Holmes, the most annoyingly detail-oriented man on the planet. Apply your methods, I trust you will quickly deduce what I like and what. What I don’t.”

It was hard to think, half lying across his beloved’s body, the cage of Watson’s ribs expanding within his arms, with Watson looking up at him, undeniable lust and faith mingled in his eyes.

“Details, yes,” Holmes said. “There are none I’d rather catalog than yours.” He kissed the pulse throbbing in Watson's throat, ran a hand down his chest and recorded the way the doctor arched into it.

Watson short-circuited his methodical exploration by dragging Holmes against himself and grinding their hips together. He nipped the detective’s ear.  

Holmes made an incoherent noise that might have started as Watson’s name.

“And then perhaps,” Watson whispered, “I shall find a way to put a stop to those incessant observations of yours for just a moment.”

“That would be a, ah, gift.” Holmes forced himself to stop moving against the doctor so he could look into his eyes. “Watson, this is…you are a gift.”

“As you are a gift to me, dear man.” Watson kissed his forehead chastely, then grinned. “As you are forever telling me, we have a barter system.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading! Not exactly a light-hearted fic; I can only hope I treated the subject with the care it deserves.


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